Unmarried women are less likely than their married counterparts to register and to vote but they could be a key Democratic voting bloc in November if candidates get moving to address their issues.

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A new report from the Washington-based Voter Participation Center, an organization that registers voters and studies voting habits, finds that unmarried women could be a powerful political force, but many don’t vote or aren’t registered to vote.

New State-By-State Data on Demographics, Voting and Registration Rates, Economic Impact, Health Care, and More
Elected Officials and Candidates Must Recognize the Economic and Political Power of Unmarried Women and Speak To Their Issues

The Voter Participation Center today released a groundbreaking new report: “Unmarried Women in America: Cornerstone of our Democracy.” The report includes previously unreleased research on unmarried women in key battleground states, including data on demographics, voting and registration rates, age, economic impact, health care, educational attainment, and more.

VPC pioneered the concept of a “marriage gap” among women voters, recognizing that whether a woman is either married or unmarried is one of the most powerful predictors of differences in civic participation and voting behavior.

Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, released the following statement as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments today in the Texas redistricting case Abbott v. Perez:

“Our democracy works best when everyone is able to vote under the principle of ‘one person, one vote.’ In Texas, politicians targeted Latino voters and diluted their political power by racially discriminating against voters and gerrymandering them into unconstitutional districts.

“This extreme partisan gerrymandering is politics at its worst – an abuse of power by changing the rules so one party wins, and voters lose.

No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception, have children out of wedlock and do not marry.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty” in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.”

The reality, however, is that single motherhood is not the reason we have unusually high poverty in the United States, compared with other rich democracies.

Susan Mulligan, writing for U.S. News, points to Voter Participation Center’s report on how the Rising American Electorate will influence upcoming elections:

Democrats thought they had it all figured out in 2016. Unmarried women, young people, Latinos and other ethnic and racial minorities, otherwise known as the “Rising American Electorate,” were going to be the tipping point that handed Democrats a victory.

In his article today, Voting at black colleges has tumbled. Can Dems fix the apathy in time for 2018?, Tony Pugh for McClatchy quoted our recent report with the progressive firm Lake Research Partners:

Once prized fighters in the battle for voting rights, students at America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities dropped their guard in the 2016 elections.

Voter turnout among the estimated 300,000 students at HBCUs fell nearly 11 percent from 2012 to 2016, according to a national survey by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University.

A new analysis by the Voter Participation Center of 2017 absentee voting and early voting in Virginia shows that key groups in the Rising American Electorate — unmarried women, people of color, and young people — have voted in higher numbers than they did in the 2013 Virginia elections.